Landscapers get head start for Soldier Field overhaul

April 25, 2003|By Liam Ford, Tribune staff reporter.

With Soldier Field's overhaul in the final stages, the transformation of parking lots around the stadium into parkland should be well on its way when the new arena opens this fall, project officials said Thursday.

More than 50 ash trees have been planted in the medians of what will be known as Museum Campus Drive, said Patrick Connelly, manager for Monahan's Inc. landscaping at the stadium. About 1,300 trees are slated for the areas surrounding the arena.

The Soldier Field project and changes to the surrounding parkland are being financed with $432 million in proceeds from tax-backed bonds and $200 million in private funding. Officials expect the new 61,500-seat arena, built within the original 1924 stadium's colonnades, to open Sept. 29 with the Chicago Bears' football home opener for the season.

Officials had expected to do much of the landscaping around Soldier Field in the spring of 2004, but work has been going quickly enough that landscapers have started planting more than $8 million in greenery. Much of it will be finished when the Bears play their first game at the new arena.

"It's going to look much more like a stadium in a park and a lot less like a stadium in a construction area by game day" than originally thought, said Barnaby Dinges, a project spokesman.

Almost two-thirds of the landscaping should be done before the stadium opens, with the parking lot just east of the field being the largest unfinished area.

Finding trees called for in the $632 million overhaul has sometimes been difficult, said Peter Lindsay Schaudt, head landscape architect.

Schaudt and other architects wanted trees at the parkland's entrances to be larger than the usual 2- to 4-inch diameter trees planted in new parks.

Of the 181 autumn purple white ash trees being planted, for example, 178 will have trunks about 6 inches in diameter and will reach almost 20 feet toward their mature height of 50 or 60 feet. Large ginkgo trees--renowned for being among the most ancient tree species--will be planted near the Field Museum along McFetridge Drive, in honor of the Field's study of natural history, Schaudt said.

"We spent six months tagging trees in the Midwest, and actually, some parts of the East," Schaudt said. "The nursery trade was depleted in the boom of the '90s, and it's been hard to get some of what we wanted."

Trees have come in quickly, with about 500 ashes, red oaks and hawthorns sitting in a temporary nursery near Burnham Harbor, close to where a formal "great lawn" will be laid out.

The topography of the flat parking lots is being reshaped into slopes and berms, with 120,000 cubic yards of landfill used from 1917 to 1924 to create the land on which the stadium sits, Schaudt said. To ensure the trees thrive, landscapers are also laying down mixtures of sand, peat and topsoil, he said.